


Where Our Sins Lie Unatoned

by commoncomitatus



Category: The New Legends of Monkey (TV)
Genre: Gen, Survival, Transformation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-04
Updated: 2018-11-04
Packaged: 2019-08-17 14:00:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16517819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/commoncomitatus/pseuds/commoncomitatus
Summary: Sandy's journey from abandoned child to shadow-dwelling force of nature.





	Where Our Sins Lie Unatoned

**Author's Note:**

> Notes: Born out of research for my current WIP of never-ending doom, this idea refused to shut up until I gave it a little ficlet of its own. Because apparently all the words in the universe are still not enough to adequately convey my feelings on this subject.
> 
> Warnings: Blood, violence, animal death, all within the framework of survival.

***

She had her father’s hands.

Strong but slender. Long fingers, broad knuckles. Delicate and powerful all at once. He could have played an instrument if they had the money, or so he said. And maybe she could too, if the world hadn’t been the way it was, if her life hadn’t taken the turns it did. If she hadn’t become—

Well.

Many, many reasons why it would never have happened.

They were miraculous, his hands. He could gut a fish from head to tail in a single stroke, ruthless and efficient and effortless, like it was the easiest thing in the world. Her stomach always turned at the violence of it, even before she understood why, sickened by the way its insides spilled out over the kitchen table, its bones all snapped and scattered and thrown away. Life to death and then devoured: the life of a fisherman.

The violence would stick inside her stomach, inside her head, but after it was done, the mess all tossed aside and nothing left but the smell of cooking, then he would lift them up — her and her brothers and her sisters — and hold them so gently they barely felt a thing.

“Be careful,” her mother would say. Playful, but always with a flicker of worry. Like she wondered, too, how anyone could be so strong and so gentle at the same time. “You’ll hurt them if you’re not careful.”

But he never, ever did.

Not once. Never.

Not until—

And even then, he was still so brutally gentle.

With her, at least. On the road, not so much. Kept his hands tight on the reins, his knuckles turned white, his slender, powerful fingers gripping with so much force that the horse complained.

She closed her eyes, rocking in the seat beside him, and felt the fear carve out pieces from her insides.

The horse didn’t scream, though.

Not like before. Not like the fish.

It just complained, the way horses do.

So why, then, was she still frightened?

When they stopped, a thousand hours later, he was gentle again. With her, he was always gentle. Even as he hurt her in the most terrible way, even as he lashed out with his words and his eyes and his voice, even as every part of him became a gutting knife, still his hands were so gentle.

He left her there. Alone and lonely, terrified and trembling, lost and confused and crying and crying and crying. He hugged her once, briefly, squeezed her shoulder and kissed her forehead, and then he was gone, with nothing left to touch her but his last words, his final goodbye: _never come back_.

She didn’t. But he stayed with her.

His long fingers, his broad knuckles. His delicate power, his gentleness and strength. The way he could gut a creature in a single stroke.

She thought about him, the first time she killed.

Back against the wall. Fingers raw from scrabbling in the dirt. Frightened, ferocious, feral. Self-defence, if she was human, but she wasn’t.

Neither were they.

Survival. Action without thought. Her nerves surged to life inside of her, blood and bone and body, and then she was unstoppable. Raw. Ragged. She razed them to the ground with nothing but her hands. Her delicate, powerful hands.

His hands.

He taught her that once. Survival. On the boat, when she was very young. The seas were angry and wild, and she was small and still mostly human, and she couldn’t find the deck under her feet. He always said she’d make a poor sailor; “don’t got the legs for it,” he’d mutter, and she would nod and pretend she understood. Still, he kept trying anyway, kept teaching, kept guiding her with his gentle hands.

 _Survival_ , he said when the seas got angry, and then his hands weren’t gentle any more.

She watched, frozen, as he worked the nets, hauling with a strength she’d never seen in anyone before. The waves were rough and relentless, pounding and pouring water over them both, but he didn’t falter. Couldn’t falter. Too many mouths to feed, he told her, and he held on to the net with every ounce of strength he had.

This, she learned. Wrapped it around herself without even realising it.

And then, all of a sudden, it was her turn.

Demons. Three of them and one of her, and she still wasn’t completely convinced that she wasn’t one too.

She was still very young, still too small, still unable to find her footing even when the ground wasn’t moving, but there was nothing human left in her any more. If not a demon, then something else, different but just as dangerous. And she was trapped with her back to the wall, and she had her father’s hands and her father’s strength and a tiny, tiny lifetime of learning how to use it.

So she did.

And maybe it was the thing inside her, the maybe-demon, maybe-something-else, rushing to the surface to save her life like it did the day she fell into the sea, just another part of the thing she was becoming. Maybe it was her father’s voice in her head, his strength in her hands, his grace and his power, the way he could move his fingers like a musician and bare his knuckles like a boxer, the way he made even the ocean cower on the days when his temper was high.

She did not have a temper. But she had his hands and his lessons and the thing growing inside her, and she used them well. Power. Precision. Everything he’d ever taught her, and a few things he never could.

She split their bodies apart with her fingers and her fists, because she had to survive and because she could not stop. And the crunch of bone on bone didn’t sound anything like the hiss of a gutting knife or the crack of a fish’s spine pulled out and discarded, but when the demons fell to the ground, bleeding and broken and dead, she did not feel their pain.

Only her own.

And by then, she was used to that.

Blood in her mouth, on her teeth.

Blood on her knuckles, her fingers.

Only some of it was hers.

The rest—

And then she was on her knees, heaving and horrified and helpless. Unable to breathe, unable to think. But alive. Still alive.

 _Survival_. It didn’t taste any better on dry land.

That feeling would linger for a long, long time. And it would be longer still before she learned to reconcile the blood on her hands with the need to survive, before she learned — one almost-death too many — that she never had a choice.

*

With surviving came starvation.

Hunger like she’d never known. Great pains wracking her belly, desperate and destructive, leaving her weak and trembling. Screaming, like the creatures they hauled up from the sea.

She knew how to kill to eat. Remembered the gutting knife, the bones, the insides of the creatures they caught. But their cries still echoed in her head, a maelstrom without end, and she couldn’t cover her ears and cut them open at the same time. Couldn’t silence the noise, the memory of the noise, the echo of those screams and sobs. From them and then, later, from herself.

It was so much easier, killing demons. Demons didn’t shout and claw inside her head. Demons didn’t beg for mercy, didn’t cry and cry and cry, didn’t drive her mad with screams that no-one else could hear. Demons weren’t helpless, innocent creatures, doomed to the dinner table just for being what they were. Demons were vicious and violent things; they had blood in their mouths before she ever touched them. Demons didn’t cry when they died and demons didn’t scream for their lives.

Demons only fought.

And she fought back.

But she couldn’t eat a demon, no more than she could eat a human. She was a twisted, dangerous, unnatural thing, whether she was one of them or not, but she could never be _that_.

Not yet, anyway.

Not while she could still try to be something else.

So she learned to hunt other things.

Learned to seek out the silent creatures, the ones she couldn’t hear. The four-legged beasts that stalked the land around the villages, the winged things that prowled the skies. Creatures who didn’t know how to swim, who had no water in their lungs, no bubbles for voices. Silent. Safe. She learned to close her eyes while she wrung their necks, and tried not to imagine that they were just demons in different skins.

She ate with storms in her stomach, starved and sickened at the same time. She couldn’t stop wondering if there were others like her, out there in the dark, pressing their hands against their ears, drowned in these creatures’ screams.

Survival was suffering. This, her father never taught her. Survival, true survival, was sore feet and stomach pains and shivers; it was hiding from people, hiding from demons, and slaughtering the few good creatures that meant her no harm. It was hurting in places that had never known it before, grief for things she’d never thought she could lose. It was looking down at her hands — _his_ hands — and seeing them start to shake.

On him, those hands never shook. Not once, not even in the roughest seas. They were strong and they were gentle, and they were always under control. They would hold back the tides by sheer force of will, and they would haul in fish so large they almost sank the boat, and they would cradle sleeping children like they were made of stardust, impossible and infinitely precious.

On her, surviving and surviving, those hands became clumsy and crippled. Feral, ferocious, fearful. Fingers twisted into talons, into claws, into whatever weapon was needed to keep her alive. Knuckles bruised down to the bone, burned and bloody and battered. Palms blackened with earth, with dirt and dust and decay, with dead bodies dissolving at her feet. Power upon power, strength upon strength, but where had the gentleness gone?

She wondered what he would think of her, if he saw what she had become. She wondered if he even thought of her at all.

She wondered about her mother too, at the beginning. Remembered how she’d kissed her goodnight that last time, the night before she left. Remembered seeing salt on her cheeks and wondering why. Remembered her hands, so much slimmer than her father’s, shaking as they touched her face.

She felt ashamed, then, when her own hands began to shake, and she felt like a child and she felt so old she couldn’t bear it.

She tried not to think about her brothers and her sisters. Tried not to wonder how much they knew, whether they missed her, whether they cared. Tried not to wonder if they were warm and happy and well-fed, if they were better sailors than she had been, if they were better humans.

Better people.

She wondered what would happen if their paths ever crossed. Would they come at her with weapons, like so many others? Would they take pity on her, or would they just pity her? If they saw her as she was now, bloody and feral and sleeping on a bed of bones, would they know she was once their sister?

Would she want them to?

And her heart wanted so badly to cry, for them and for herself, but her body had forgotten how.

*

She learned to keep busy.

Her hands, her mind, her body.

Learned not to think too much, or too hard. Learned to pour her thoughts out onto parchment and then throw them away. Learned to do the same with her memories. Learned that it was easier to breathe when she didn’t have to think, didn’t have to remember, didn’t have to feel.

She made sure to always have something in her hands, something to keep them occupied. She stole a knife, carved things out of bones. Wore the remains on a string around her neck, twisted it around and around her fingers when they started to shake.

And they did. More and more as the time passed, until she barely recognised the delicate strength they could have had, until she barely remembered where they came from, who had them first.

She stopped thinking so much about the things she killed. Demons or dinner, did it really matter in the end? It all became the same after the hundredth time. She got used to the piles of bones at her feet, the blood on her fingers and in her mouth. Got used to the creature she was, not quite a demon but so, so far from human. Got used to living under the world instead of in it.

She tried to do good. Did it badly. Tried to help people who did not want her help. She saved them from demons, then they turned around and stared at her like she was something worse.

Blood on her hands, shaking. Blood on her face, wild-eyed, savage and feral and hungry. And she didn’t understand why they looked at her and saw only a monster.

She saw herself sometimes, too, reflected in water. Gaunt and ragged and pale, nothing like what she used to be.

She’d never been pale before. Touched by the sun, her skin would find a thousand colours, rich and healthy and forever warm. But it had been so long since she’d seen the sun, so long since the sun had seen her, so long since they’d trusted each other not to catch fire. There was no colour left in her skin any more; it had spilled out of her so fast, like a kind of blood that came from somewhere deeper than the vein.

And gaunt. She’d always been tall, always been a little too thin, but she had never been starved before. Never been so hungry her belly screamed, never been so weak her legs stopped working. Never been ravenous and rabid, so close to madness for the want of something, anything to stop the cramping inside her. Never been so desperate that she would kill for it, again and again and again.

That was her father’s job. Hers was only to eat.

But she learned. With no-one to teach her, with only a half-faded memory of old lessons, she taught herself. How to stay alive, how to keep herself in one piece. And she grew thinner but she was alive, and she grew paler but she was _alive_.

She didn’t know if she was even able to die. And on the bad days, the ones where there was nothing but pain and loneliness, where every part of her screamed and sobbed and suffered she wondered if it really mattered.

So she closed her mind, bowed her body, and fought. Held to the ground like the ground was moving, like she was back on the deck of a salt-soaked boat, losing her balance and longing for the sea to take her again.

And her hands grew stronger, stained with dirt and ash and blood, and sometimes she could feel a new kind of power bursting to life inside them, and she wondered if that was why they kept shaking.

It made her feel sick sometimes, to look at them. Musician’s hands, made to be gentle, but all they could do was kill.

And she wondered, more than once, if her life was really worth so much death. She lived and she lived, and she clung to survival like it was the only word she knew, and the bones piled up at her feet and the blood seeped deep inside her skin, black on red, the only colours she ever saw. And the people she saved were more afraid of her than the demons she saved them from, and her voice became hoarse and jagged because she never had a reason to use it.

And the nights were freezing, silent but so loud, a hush in the air and voices chattering in the water, and the shaking in her hands spread and spread until it swallowed her whole body.

She dreamed, sometimes, about home, about a family it was getting harder and harder to remember. Faces blurry and indistinct, bodies all bent and twisted, gnarled by time and distorted by memory. She forgot so much — wanted to forget, tried to forget, made herself forget — but when she woke she would look down at her powerful, delicate, shaking hands, and remember how to cry.

After a while, it was the only thing she did remember. The littlest pain, and the gentlest.

She couldn’t remember her mother’s face, or her eyes. She couldn’t remember her brothers’ voices or her sisters’ smiles. She couldn’t remember her father’s hands; she could only remember that once, a long time ago, they were hers too.

So, one day, she made herself a new family. Delicate little figures, carved from the bones of her meals, tiny and fragile and as inhuman as she was. Hollow things, all blank and empty, but they were hers.

And she held them in her hands, those tiny little not-people, and she tried so hard to be gentle, to be kind, to hold them like children, but it had been so long that she no longer knew what gentleness felt like. And the bones dug into her palms because she gripped them too tightly, and her skin split and stained everything with blood, and she howled in grief and pain and threw them all away, as hard and as far as she could.

And then, again, she was alone.

And she did not dream about anything again for many, many years.

*

With time, her powers bloomed.

Floods and floods of water. Roaring and surging, dripping and trickling, motion that ebbed and flowed in rhythm with her mood. It filled her hands, made them shake even harder, but this time it felt very different. Ripples of power in her veins, pouring out through the skin, tremors and bubbles like undersea earthquakes. And they were hers, all hers.

It held her, some days more than she held it. A cradle, rocking her in the dead of night, the rhythm of _drip, drip, drip_ on the walls, a lullaby that filled her until she slept, submerged.

And she became fast. Incredibly, impossibly fast. Fast enough to outrun the shadows. Fast enough to use them like harbours in a storm, shelter and sanctuary from the violence all around her. Little islands of dark, glinting in the too-much light, and she grew fast enough to always find them, to always seek out a place to stay hidden.

She learned how to fight differently. Learned how to use the shadows as weapons. Learned that there were other ways to kill a demon than with her hands, learned that there were other uses for her hands than killing things.

She learned to use her legs instead. A strange, unexpected lesson, that one. She’d never been very good at holding her balance; she remembered so little of her life before but she remembered that with perfect clarity. Remembered choppy waters, the boat bobbing and dipping and lurching, remembered trying to keep her feet under her, remembered failing again and again and again.

Eyes on the horizon, knees locked. She remembered trying so hard to be solid, to be strong and gentle at the same time, to find her balance and hold fast and close like—

Like him.

Holding to the deck like it was just another part of his body, like he lived and breathed in rhythm with the salt-soaked wood. And all the while she staggered and stumbled and couldn’t figure out how to make herself solid.

She knew better now. Knew not to try. Her legs weren’t made for holding fast to anything, and they weren’t made for finding stillness in motion; they were made for running, for kicking, for letting loose all the strength and speed they could hold.

And they did. And she did.

She ran and she kicked and she unleashed a thousand kinds of hell with her legs, and she learned how to kill from a distance, how to strike like lightning on the open seas.

Her hands, no longer stained with blood, suddenly looked strange and unfamiliar.

They still shook, especially when they had nothing to do. Shook with power, water bubbling on her palms. Shook with memory, things that only her skin remembered. Shook like the strangers she saw leaving the taverns at night, the ones whose lives had thrown them into liquids less friendly than water. Shook like the walls when she fought, distracting and uncomfortable, becoming still only when she braced herself on the ground.

So she learned to carry a weapon. Long reach, keen blade gleaming, always in her hands. Knuckles turning white, fingers engaged, gripping hard and fast and tight, until the tremors stopped completely, until she felt the weight of steel like an anchor, holding her to the ground while her legs made her float.

Her arms and shoulders grew strong, and her reach grew longer and longer, and she learned to transform combat into a sort of dance, weaving and ducking and always in motion. A spin, a kick, a _slash_ , and then blessed, beautiful silence. Silence on the ground as her enemies gurgled their last breath. Silence inside her head as she watched the blood start to spill, as she slipped into the shadows and vanished, so fast now that it never touched her skin.

She learned to appreciate loneliness, too. Learned to bask in isolation, in solitude. Water dripping above her head, the hum of the creatures who made her home their home too. She protected them from the world above, the world that would gut them from mouth to tail and rip out all their bones; she protected them with sharp teeth and a sharper blade, and in return their voices grew softer inside her head. Warmer. Friendly. Almost like a family.

Not a real one. She knew that. But the only one that would ever want her.

*

Slowly, oh so slowly, she started to recognise herself.

Pale skin, reflected in water. Pale eyes, haunted and haunting, threatening death to anyone who came close. Pale hair, grown wild and tangled; like the rest of her, it couldn’t remember a time when it was cared for. Pale as death, every part of her, except the cloak she wrapped around herself.

And so she became a shadow made of moonlight, a flash of darkness so white she blinded anyone who looked at her.

For a time, she remembered nothing else. Nothing of the life she had before, nothing of the world that hated her. An echo, sometimes, of a name she might have once had, but nothing more.

Until one night, out of nowhere, a wayward memory slipped its bonds and broke, half-drowned, to the surface.

Crouched in a corner, carving trinkets out of bones. Mind empty, thinking only of stilling the shaking of her hands, of keeping them still by keeping them moving. Rhythm. She liked rhythm, thrived in it. Rhythm in motion, rhythm in sound, rhythm in everything. She sustained it like a second heartbeat and it, in turn, sustained her.

But then a thought slipped through, found a hole in the net inside her head, and all of a sudden she was small again.

A knife in her hands. Shaking, shaking, shaking down to the bone.

Her father standing over her, his fingers covering her own. So strong but so gentle. He was always so gentle with her.

“One clean stroke,” he said.

And she knew what she needed to do, but her hands wouldn’t stop shaking. They shook and they shook and they shook, and the dead fish looked up at her through its blind, lifeless eyes, and she knew that it wouldn’t feel any pain — not any more, not ever again — but she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t open it up and pull out its bones, couldn’t make a meal out of something that had died in agony for her.

And her hands shook harder and harder, and she started to cry because she wanted so badly to be strong like him, but she wasn’t, she was small and far too gentle to ever know strength.

And he let her go, and he set the knife down on the kitchen table, so softly that it didn’t make a sound. And then he kissed her forehead and told her that one day she would understand.

And she did.

Years later. Alone and transformed, a god in the guise of a demon, rejected by the world above, at home in the shadows below. A knife in her hand, bones scattered at her feet. Strong and powerful and dangerous, all of the terrible things he thought he saw that night he told her to never come back. Nothing left of the gentleness but the tremors in her hands.

He tried so hard to teach her, to shape her into something like him, something that could be both: strong and gentle, keen and kind. A fisherman with the hands of a musician, who knew how to hold his balance on the roughest seas, who could gut a fish in a single stroke and then hold his children like they were stardust.

But she wasn’t like him, even then, and she could never learn the lessons he tried to teach. She couldn’t keep her balance on a tossing boat, couldn’t find the ground when it kept moving. She couldn’t gut a fish that was already dead, couldn’t make clean strokes, couldn’t find the strength to do what had to be done. She couldn’t be strong and gentle at the same time, even though her hands were exactly the same as his. 

He taught her to be solid. He taught her to hold fast to the ground, to the deck, to the world. He taught her keep it under her at all times, even when it pitched and yawed and threatened to drown her. He taught her to kill and gut and destroy her food and her enemies. Taught her to become one with the world around her, to touch it but never let it touch her in return. He taught her to be like stone.

But of course it didn’t work. How could it?

She was never meant to be solid, and she could never be like stone.

That was a lesson she had to teach herself.

She was water, roaring and rippling and running, running, running.

Running, until she found her way home.

***


End file.
